The Hidden Opportunity in Tutorial Channels (Thomas Frank Interview)

two years ago Thomas Frank made the seemingly crazy decision to abandon his 2 million subscriber YouTube channel that he spent a decade of his life building to make software tutorials I wanted to create a destination that people immediately thought of as the go-to place to learn notion I want to make software tutorials so good-looking that people are like why would he put this much effort into it this is stupid his decision paid off big time the Thomas Frank explains channel has grown to 220,000 subscribers done over 10 million views and doubled his Vue just by teaching people how to use the productivity and notetaking software notion in this episode you'll learn how to design the perfect viewer experience I wanted to have this experience where people find a video they click over to the channel and they realize like I want to learn notion and this is the place for it how to think about browse views versus search views I naively thought that TF explains was going to be a search only channel that turned out to be wrong actually we have more traffic from browse features and suggested than we do from search the pros and cons of Rel rying on outside platforms for Success you're never going to get to space by riding a bicycle you Bill yourself and what every person starting a tutorial Channel needs to do don't worry about the strategy just make what you're interested in and put it up on YouTube it's Been probably a year more than a year since we first recorded on the Channel I want to hear how you're thinking about your YouTube strategy generally right now I'm going to leave it that open and ambiguous I have to give some context because my YouTube strategy is being informed by a bigger strategy and that is that we are launching a new startup we are calling it Fly lighter and it is starting out as the best Web Clipper for notion but eventually will be just the best idea capture and knowledge capture tool that you've ever seen that also lets you take things uh from the web or from your head and get them into whatever app you're using instead of it being an app where you browse that data so that makes my strategy change quite a bit because for the past year couple of years years I've been almost entirely focused on teach notion sell notion templates be like the king of that n well now we're kind of taking the next logical step in building a tool that serves those users but then we also have to build brand affinity and awareness for the tool itself so rather than just relying on notion content to do that I'm launching my main Channel again and I don't just want to make productivity content again but I realize that there is a very strong strategic reason to create productivity content there's still stuff I want to teach around that so we're going to be doing some more productivity videos uh that may not just feature an oce as the app I talk about and then uh I think I also want to you know give myself permission to talk about some of the things that I am interested in and have developed skills in over the past couple of years on the channel like building my no code skills even my coding skills uh talking a bit about Business and Entrepreneurship and I think people like Ali abdall have sort of demonstrated that once you've built up that Affinity around your own personal brand the audience is interested in the things that you are doing as well it was kind of like a refreshingly simple goal to have in the past of just like I want to become the recognized personality and expert for this growing tool that isn't mine now things are more difficult because we're trying to balance that with Al also building up our own startup and and building brand Affinity around that I was jealous of the Simplicity of that goal I was like man what's what's my thing I just want to do the one thing I thought I thought it was great I feel like there's grasses greener syndrome with that no matter who you are no matter where you are because I feel jealousy around that with our mutual friend Justin Welsh who basically has his singular thing uh being Sol preneurship I'm over here with like well I've got my singular thing it's notion but boy that thing over there is like singular but also applies to a lot of different things whereas like mine is a specific tool and I have to convince people they want to like learn about formulas in that tool so there's you know strengths and weaknesses no matter what Niche you're in no matter what sort of balance you have with uh regard to Broad versus narrow Focus uh so it's funny to hear you say like you have experienced that kind of the same jealousy because I feel it with Justin help us understand why you split in the first place why create Thomas Frank explains versus produce the notion content on the main Channel The Main Idea here is I wanted to create a destination that people immediately thought of as the go-to place to learn notion for me it wasn't necessarily about how is the algorithm going to see this content because we've probably talked about this in the show before the algorithm doesn't necessarily uh penalize your entire your entire channel for having variety content it'll just sort of push out the content that people want to see to those people and then the rest of it might just not get pushed out but it was more a perception play more than anything else I wanted to have this experience where people find a video they click over to the channel and they realize like I want to learn ocean and this is the place for it and if it's on the main Channel mixed in with a bunch of General productivity content it's not going to sell that perception quite as fast it's not going to set that first impression the other thing was on the flip side the main channel was supposed to be productivity tips life advice personal finance like all that more General stuff so if I have a video that's like here's how to change your URL Handler for an ocean link and then put it into a shortcut like nobody cares about that it's super Niche so uh again it's just like it's all semantics it's all on me at the end of the day but I thought it was going to be the best strategic decision for building the perception when you create CH uh videos on the main Channel versus Thomas Frank explains are you thinking about the way views will happen differently because I would think that on Thomas Frank explains we're doing a lot of tutorials is the strategy for a tutorial video the same as the strategy for a more generalized productivity video on the main Channel I don't think so and I have to speak from my experience here more than my plans for the future because the main Channel's goals are going to be different going forward but for the past six seven years uh I've had sponsorships on the main channel so there was very much a we want to see good conversions within the first 30 days Thomas sort of like pressure hanging over my head so there was very much like we want to see uh good performance views wise in the early days of the video on TI explains originally I did not care about the views at all in fact uh I naively thought that TF explains was going to be a search only Channel and it would never get any sort of organic promotion in the homepage or the browse features uh that turned out to be wrong actually we have more traffic from browse features and suggested them we do from search but those videos are very very longtail I've seen multiple times videos that start out as like a 10 out of 10 eventually become one of the higher performing videos on the channel I think our notion databases tutorial was like that it was a 10 out of 10 for the first week or two and now it's like maybe sixth or seventh from the top it has nearly 300,000 views which is great for the notion Niche so yeah it's more just like I'm going to put out an evergreen piece of content or as Evergreen as it can be with a a tech app that changes a lot and I'm just going to let it do its thing it's just another it's like another piece of the library that forms the channel whereas on the main Channel I don't really feel like there's like a like a specific Library I'm building it almost feels like I'm constructing a textbook on Thomas Frank explains and on the longtail videos on Thomas Frank explains does that longtail come from search or is that just YouTube getting better at recommending to specific viewers who it thinks the time is right for them to learn this thing uh actually don't think I've checked about the longtail specifically uh split what I do know about the algorithm is it will continually try new audience out new audience segments out over time even as the video becomes older and older and that's why you will often and see random spikes in your videos sometimes months and months after the fact a lot of creators are like where the heck did that come from sometimes it was just like the algorithm finally found the right pocket for this video because you've had some very very specific videos you know I think about your your fairly recent video about how I use AI to take perfect notes without typing uh over 600,000 views on a long tutorial that seems like a very specific thing that somebody would want to do and it's just really awesome that this level of like I know that started for you as just this curiosity can I do this for me that you spent like what days on maybe weeks on getting to work oh not not days or weeks months that video I mean and I just published a new one uh that's unfortunately not doing as well in fact maybe we could talk about why I shot myself in the foot with the newest video but I spent like an additional three months working like nights and weekends often full day sometimes uh making a much better version of that workflow that's like very plug andplay it takes the setup time from like half an hour down to five minutes for the user it's much easier so I'm thinking like oh it's GNA be another viral hit no it's it's not doing nearly as well uh and I think part of the reason is maybe it's the the AI hype is down died a little bit but uh I think I really shot myself in the foot by being like hey there's a full guide that I wrote for all three versions of this workflow Google Drive one drive Dropbox and uh I've noticed the the watch time on that video is really low so I think it's people going oh the written guide is even easier than the video let me just click on that and leave the video interesting so like there's almost like this hm maybe I should have waited until the end to tell people there was a written guide and just had them sit through the tutorial yeah do you see do you see that in the retention curve uh yeah definitely it's like the most clear-cut case between between like serving the audience is a bad thing for retention in this video's case and I almost wonder if it like if it lit Lally worked out better to be a kind of pain in the butt tutorial the first time after a quick break we talk about how big of a role the software itself plays in your Channel's success so stick around we'll be right back this video is sponsored by notion the most essential tool in my business I know that's a bold statement but it's absolutely true all of my notes projects tasks experiments and research for this channel is done right inside notion if you're not using notion yet I encourage you to give it a try their person plan is free and it's one of the best free products on the market recently they rolled out notion calendar which is a productivity nerds dream come true it brings your docs notes and project dates into your calendar you can search and connect notion docs directly to events so everything lives in the same place and you have all the contexts that you need if you're a Google Calendar user like me and you get nervous about making a big switch it actually integrates with Google Calendar so you can try it out risk-free before making a full commitment now I'm actually on a paid notion plan because I want access to all the newest AI functionality their newest feature is called Q&A and it's an absolute GameChanger think of notion as your second brain and notion Q&A as an ond demand assistant familiar with everything in that second brain instead of trying to remember where some piece of information is stored you just ask notion Q&A and it sweeps through all of your documents and returns a specific answer in the related Pages where that information was found using notion Q&A is like having a conversation with your data it saves you so much time and reduces the stress of making sure you organize everything perfectly and if you collaborate with a team this makes it much easier for them to find information even if they don't know how everything is organized Q&A is included in all existing notion AI subscriptions you can get started with notion AI for only $10 a month and if you're already a notion AI user you can get started today with Q&A already in your notion workspace to find out more or give oce a try for free just visit the link in the description I'm thinking about the role of the platform you choose how how big of a role do you think notion being the tool that you chose played in this Channel's success a big rule I think I would describe this as a symbiotic relationship part of why notion is so successful and continues to grow uh to grow is kind of like that Ikea effect it gives people this basically Set of Legos to play with and that makes people really proud of what they build and they want to go share it so notion is in this very enviable position where it has a very passionate user base that is constantly talking about it constantly creating free content about it uh and then they've they've developed this even more enviable position where creators have realized uh as in my case you can literally sell what you've created so that now further incentivizes people like me and other notion creators to constantly talk about notion not just our product prodcts but also their product in general because that helps to build up our audiences I think if I had picked a tool that was sort of on the decline in terms of user base maybe this is unfair but I'll just pick ASA out of the air um I don't know if Asa has quite that cultural interest right now I don't know if it's growing in quite the same way uh especially from a large user-based perspective so I'm not sure that I would have been able to grow to the same same levels however uh as I'm thinking about this I do want to bring up a Counterpoint and that is another Channel called the Koda guy now I think Koda is not in the same boat as AAA it's a newer app it does have a growing user base it is much more Niche does not have quite the same following as notion so when you go look at the Koda gu's channel it's not quite as big he doesn't usually break 10K views on a video but he's on track to make like half a million dollars this year in Revenue wow and I think a lot of what he's doing is like Consulting helping companies build up their internal Koda docs so instead of selling like a $50 template it might be like a $5,000 Consulting session or something like that I'm not quite sure but yeah he has found similar financial success in covering a tool that doesn't have sort of like the same media attention as notion in like Venture Capital investing there's this this idea of platform risk like is the thing that you're building on top of another thing so there are potential existential rings to your risk to your thing based on that thing do you think about platform risk or should somebody watching this who's thinking about making their own tutorials Channel How should they think about platform risk I do think about it a lot actually just yesterday notion had downtime and I was just like well yeah this is annoying cuz our products don't work and people are buying our products and can't use them and we have to email them be like hey try again later it's you know not really us to a degree I think there's a lot of platform risk even if you're not covering one tool like I have platform risk on YouTube I think if that went away I don't know how much I'd be able to leverage Twitter to get the same results I kind of think about this like a rocket ship so like if you want to get to space you need a a lot of fuel a lot of thrust a lot of power and that means you have to rely on the work of a lot of other people and then you get up there and eventually have to jettison Parts the rocket you're never going to get to space by riding a bicycle that you built yourself I love that so yeah I guess like the philosophy here is like platform risk is a necessary evil but it also often functions as like rocket fuel for a business and so your job as an entrepreneur is to constantly survey the landscape to constantly sort of do that like SWAT analysis on your business strengths weaknesses opportunities and uh threats and and and decide you know kind of on a momentto moment basis like how much platform risk is acceptable right now should I be diversifying or should I be totally buckling down I think there was like an Alex Heros tweet a while ago this was like this is stuck in my head a lot he said you don't get rich by diversifying you stay Rich by diversifying you typically get rich by striking it out of the park on one really big thing so a lot of opportunities we have these days are building one really big thing on top of another platform and it's just part of the risk that you uh take on as an entrepreneur you know that's what we do we take risks right I've always had this I think is probably an irrational fear of creating videos around a tool or even even if just part of the video features a tool because I worry that even changes in the UI of just how it looks will frustrate me to know someday like the thing that is shown in that video is no longer the way things look that has to have happened so many times in the course of doing uh notion tutorials what's your relationship to uh platform changes that uh you know relate to videos that you've made in the past I'm going to tell a philosophical story to hit to kick this one off when I was a a college student uh one year these Buddhist monks came to our college and they set up a gigantic Round Table in our big Memorial Union area they spent an entire week very carefully pouring this like finely colored sand to create what's called a Mandola it's this beautiful piece of sand art that takes them five full days eight hours a day just pouring sand to create and so they make this and then when it's done they do a little ceremony and they sweep it away and it's basically an exercise in appreciating the ephemerality of life I bring that story up because that is the mindset that I have tried to adopt when it comes to making content about tech there is no such thing as permanence uh and I think on the internet we can convince ourselves that if we pick the right Niche we do get permanence and we can create this Evergreen content that's just never going to go away uh but the fact is even if you pick something that is like if you're talking about stoic philosophy right I can go talk about Marcus aelius all day long and then next year Ryan holiday is going to make a better video and mine's out moded and I need to go make a new video because the meta shifted so there's there's just no such thing as uh permanence and I have accepted that as somebody who makes content about notion eventually I'm going to have to completely re-shoot notion fundamentals I'm going to have to completely re-shoot my uh tutorials for my products and I just Embrace that it kind of sucks like it does get frustrating sometimes especially when it's like a small change but it's important but you know that's just sort of the trade-off that I accept for getting to create content every day about a tool that I'm a huge nerd about how do you vet what you create videos around then because I imagine like you're doing so much stuff all the time how do you decide like what is too specific and nerdy is there a too specific in nerdy is that actually a pro so I will say despite my online veneer of business business strategy Mogul or whatever people want to call me my primary driver for what I make is what I'm interested in this can often lead to me making a two-hour video about the notion API it can lead to me making like spending three months programming something and then releasing a video where I accidentally killed the watch time but beyond that there is some strategy and I think it is especially clear for Thomas Frank explains I know who I'm serving I'm serving people who want to learn notion so there are things that just need to be in the online video textbook that is that channel there needs to be a video on the API there needs to be a video on um database features there needs to be a video on on just building pages and linking all that kind of stuff in many cases you can literally just go into your YouTube analytics and see what your viewers are searching for they have that research tab in analytics and you can see where your content gaps are on the main Channel you have this cinematic aesthetic uh in the videos in the thumbnails on Thomas Frank explains these aren't cinematic videos it's not the word I would use for them how do you think about production like Fidelity b-roll all these different things that you probably spend a lot more time thinking about on the main Channel than you do in Thomas Frank explains yeah so Thomas Frank explains had a very very strong Mission from the get-go and I think that really helped me to get clear on what needed to be prioritized and what didn't if people are coming to a video with the intent of learning how to build a task manager notion they probably don't need 120 frame per second slowmo b-roll of me drinking coffee in it they just need a good-look video that primarily sounds good and makes very clear what needs to be accomplished and what they're going to get at the the end of it that sort of led me to making the decision early on that a lot of TF explains was going to be very templated I'm going to stand in front of my camera 60 frames per second make a bunch of facial expressions and get a folder of thumbnail poses I can use forever I'm going to use the same color background for every thumbnail uh I have the same bundle of assets every thumbnail is going to have the notion logo in it that's just it's just what it is and that made thumbnail creation way way easier for Fidelity I did have this sort of egocentric but I think sort of strategic goal of I want to have the best looking software tutorials ever made I want to make software tutorials so goodlooking that people are like why would he put this much effort into it this is stupid so that's why I'm sitting in like a th000 SQ foot studio with all this stuff around me it's just like I I I wanted to do that just to see if I could do it but also I think it's going to make people talk and then beyond that it's just like make sure that everything is clear I have a lot of uh uiux graphic design experience from over the years that helped me figure out like how much should we Zoom the screen in when should we actually do a full zoom in should we highlight the mouse show the keystrokes all that kind of stuff uh on the main Channel there was never a super specific mission right like it started as this is the college infogeek Channel I'm going to teach people how to be awesome at college and there's a lot to that grades Career Fairs extracurriculars everything relationships and then that morphed into well now I'm older I guess I'm teaching the same kind of tactics and techniques but to people who are not in a defined four-year period of their life so now it's even more General every video is helpful but every video is almost like a standalone project so that sort of brought the focus down from Channel level to video level and made me focus a lot more on the artistic elements of each video and making it like a unique work but we also have more defined goals as far as the business goes I still have things I want to do on Tiff explains I want to build fly lighter I have like a startup to to Market so we're probably going to see less like Mountain Lake videos and a little bit more of that let's create a show format so we can uh better highlight the lessons we're trying to teach instead of focusing on slick b-roll and cool animations and stuff yeah I highlight that because I think it's an opportunity for people a lot of times when I talk to aspiring YouTubers they get really caught up in production and Aesthetics and all these features that make something look and sound really really great but when you when you're focused when the when the goal of the video is actually knowledge transfer and uh comprehension you know it seems like that set of considerations is secondary to accomplishing the goal which is really good knowledge capture which I or knowledge transfer which I think is a a really helpful starting point for folks who are really interested in doing tutorials or doing uh in-depth breakdowns on something very specific Yeah the more specific you go uh I would say the less work you have to do to sort of like convince a viewer to click convince a viewer to sit down and keep watching it's not to say there's nothing you can do but if somebody's like I really want to manage my tasks in notion I don't know how to build a task manager and then my video pops up it's like Master Class how to build a task manager in notion from scratch I don't have to do a lot of work to convince that viewer to click the video they already want that I just presented them exactly what they want and from there I just need to show them how to build it whereas if it's like we're going to do a video on uh you know how to get out of a rut or or like how how to get up a creative red or something like that um that is almost a I don't know if it's like too broad but it's much broader then I need to use specific software tool to get specific result so making it almost like a let's sit down and watch this as my lunchtime video versus anything else I could choose uh that comes more into play for people who watching this and they're like okay I have tools I like I have things that I'm interested in I think I might want to play around with doing a tutorials Channel anything else we haven't covered that you think they should think about or be aware of if they're going to do uh uh a tutorials channel the main thing I would say is most people listening to this probably aren't yet creating content or they're not doing it consistently so don't worry about the strategy just make what you're interested in and put it up on on YouTube and also don't worry too much about the individual results because again you're if you're creating an entire channel that is a tutorial channel for either a specific tool or a specific purpose like say graphic design or ux you're creating a library of content and you can always remake videos and if you make a video then your ability to remake it in the future and make it 10,000 times better is going to be there because you've gotten the first rep in beyond that uh I think a lot about content pillars on Thomas Frank explains so I have like the fundamentals pillar which is like somebody wants to learn how to use notion so that's all the notion fundamentals videos from the basics of creating Pages all the way up through databases then I have like the build guides and tutorials pillar that's like the task manager tutorial the tutorial on building a habit tracker personal portfolio website on notion those are typically I think if you take outliers out those are typically the most successful videos on the channel long term because they actually Teach an outcome that people want whereas the fundamental is like here's how to use the tool it's almost like a um you know here like here's how to speak French versus here's how to like actually go to France and and have a great life there that kind of thing I also have like the feature releases so this is a big thing notion is very communicative with their ambassadors about new releases so we all make content about those new releases as if they're Tech videos those videos do really well in the short term tend to pet her off after a month or so which is totally fine um but they are a great way to bring in new interest to the channel and sort of solidify your channel as a destination to do information about the tool when new features release and then I have like your typical like 10 mistakes people make when they start using notion or 10 ways to make notion faster like your kind of popcorn content that would be like the fourth U pillar I would say I love that I love the idea of I want this to be the destination for people to learn this content because I think if you have that goal in mind even if you don't see the results and analytics that you hope to early on you can ask yourself intellectually is this serving that goal because I think in the beginning probably especially on a channel like this where maybe recommended won't be as fast to hit if you're doing a very specific tutorial you need to have a long-term View and really be willing to invest the time to creating the videos hopefully one of them hits but if you're hitting that goal of is this making this the best channel on this topic I think you can know you are doing the right things before you may see results hey if you're publishing content but you aren't really making any money doing it then I've got something for you check out my free professional Creator crash course in just a few days I'll teach you how to earn a living as a professional Creator just to click the link in the description oh and I I will say there's one more pillar I didn't think about this but with the AI voice video that came out a few months ago that video went through multiple rounds of feedback with my friends and colleagues over at nebula we have like a whole feedback channel in our Slack which is probably the best thing we we offer originally my idea with that video was to call it like how I take notes with my voice in notion with chat GPT or something like that we went through a bunch of different thumbnail revisions for that idea and then my agent Dave Pops in the chat and just says one thing would this be useful for people who don't use notion and I'm like well yeah because you get to just talk to your phone record a voice note and it becomes perfect transcript in summary it just happens to be using notion as the notetaking tool but yeah I guess a lot of people would like that even if they weren't using notion so we pivoted I didn't put notion in the packaging at all thumbnails just perfect notes no typing me holding up my phone with a note behind it and then the title is how I take notes or how I use uh AI to take notes with my voice without typing or something like that but no no mention of notion that's the video that now has 600,000 views I think it's top three or four on the channel and that sort of acts as a wider net that is cast that brings in a bunch of people interested in this certain out come and then introduces notion as the tool to help them solve that problem and get that outcome uh and I remember noticing that zapier was very good at this type of marketing with their SEO strategy so for people who don't know zapier is automation tool like a no code automation tool where you can sort of connect apis together so like uh I got a new Google forms submission and now it sends me an email that's what you can do with zpp here all of their content is like the best email apps in 2021 or the best to-do apps in 2021 or um you know here's how to manage your calendar like very very broad because they're going to get a certain percentage of people who are interested in those broader topics who also are going to be like well I really want to connect my Google Calendar up to my notion for some reason oh I can use zaap here to do that so there is a sort of like fifth developing pillar on TF explains of creating these sorts of videos like the AI voice notes video that bring in people who may not might not even use notion or even know about it yet but then we'll be introduced to the tool in the video about this really cool broader thing that they're interested in so smart especially if someone's choosing a relatively new tool that may not have name recognition yet which I think is a good last question if I'm thinking about the strategy of creating a channel around a tool do you think that I need to be concerned about uh first mover advantage or is it better to choose a tool that already has some momentum uh that's a good question I don't know if it matters I'm kind of doing both I would say with notion I was not first mover um maybe I was one of the first big YouTubers to create like a mainstream video on it on the main Channel but in terms of like building TF explains August Bradley already had a ton of content Marie pulin already had a ton of content uh red Gregory already had some content I was definitely not the first player uh but the cool thing is like notion has a growing audience so there's a growing subset of that audience who wants to hear from someone like me and likes my style uh there's also subsets of the audience that want to hear about the topics and subtopics I've chosen to cover that maybe August Bradley or Marie pulin didn't really cover already I'm not sure that they had like how to build a simple task manager on their channels so I did that and my video did really well uh they have other videos that talk about other things and their videos did really well for that so I don't think it matters too much if there is a growing audience for something and you're passionate about it and you're building skill in that area that's a good good spot to be in regardless of whether or not they're other players to learn how you can Master the YouTube algorithm like Thomas check out this other interview I did with him where we talk about how he built his first channel to 2 million subscribers

Channel: Jay Clouse

Views: 34,034

Keywords: podcast, creator, creative elements, jay clouse, business podcast, creator podcast, creator economy, creator business

Id: AmAm9BRvTf4

Length: 31min 39sec (1899 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 29 2024